Mars

Scientist have been studying rocks from Mars for a number of years that mankind didn't pick up from the Martian surface and bring back to Earth on any of the many scientific missions to the red planet. The Mars rocks that have been studied intently originated on Mars, but were blowing off the surface of the planet by a massive asteroid or comet impact millions of years ago.

As much as some of us (ahem) were hoping the Mars mystery rock turned out to be a long-lost baseball from yet unknown aliens, the cause behind the rock's sudden appearance has been solved with a far less exciting explanation: Opportunity's wheel, as first speculated, kicked the rock up while moving. No alien mushroom to be seen.

NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back some impressive photos from its time on Mars - selfies, moon timelapses, and billion-pixel panoramas - but its latest helps put the plucky rover's journey in context like nothing before. A new image shared by the US space agency shows Earth in the Martian night sky, a pinprick of light traveling 99 million miles from home.

NASA's efforts on the Red Planet have resulted in thousands of images, some more mystifying than others, but few quite as powerful as a high-resolution photograph taken of a fresh asteroid impact. The photo features the resulting crater in the middle, and shows the huge rayed blast zone around it, revealing something akin to blackened sunbeams.

NASA, busy developing cutting edge technologies and exploring the dark unknown corners of the vast universe, has been hit with a quite unusual lawsuit by Rhawn Joseph of the Journal of Cosmology. The reason? He claims the mystery rock that appeared on Mars earlier this month is, in fact, a mushroom and that NASA has failed in its duties to recognize it as such.

The NASA rover Opportunity sent back a couple of surprising images from Mars last week, both of which were taken with its Pancam, revealing the rather sudden appearance of a small rock. Researchers were surprised at the quick change, and though they offered a couple possible explanations, an investigation was kicked off to try and determine how it happened. Fast-forward through the weekend, and an analysis has offered a new surprise: the chemical composition is unlike anything previously analyzed on the Red Planet.

A few NASA rovers have been working their way through the Red Planet, each working to expand scientists' knowledge of Mars and its history. As part of this, large quantities of images are taken and shuttled back to Earth, where researchers analyze them. Recently, the rover Opportunity sent back two images of the same area that had one surprising difference: the sudden appearance of a rock that hadn't been there shortly before.

Mars has been a playground for NASA's various robots and missions, and it was back in March that the Curiosity rover found evidence of conditions for habitable life, something that has cropped up in various degrees since then. According to some US researchers, it is possible that rocks containing life could have been blasted, so to speak, to the Red Planet from the Chicxulub impact that took out the dinosaurs and many other strikes.

This week the NASA folks behind the Curiosity Mars rover mission have published a set of papers which suggest that they're closer than ever to finding habitable environments on the planet. These findings are pre-emptive in finding actual organic materials, and show how life could maybe, possibly have existed on Mars at one time. Basically the scientists on this project have said they're confident that there's a possibility of life at this point without literally saying they've found that life outright.

Back in February, Dennis Tito revealed his ambitious plan to send a married couple on a flyby mission to Mars, something he has detailed today to members of Congress in a push to get the US government on board (figuratively speaking). Despite the science fiction-esque sound of it all, Tito says that the project can take place within the next couple of years rather than decades, and that he is aiming for December 2017.

NASA's Mars orbiter MAVEN launched successfully today from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 1:28PM EST. Once it arrives in orbit around the Red Planet, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN orbiter will gather data about Mars' upper atmosphere to try and discover how exactly the planet got to be so dry and atmosphere-poor. Earlier probes suggest the planet used to be much more like Earth in terms of moisture and atmosphere thickness.

India launched its first mission to Mars earlier this month in an attempt to become the fourth nation on the planet to reach Mars. Shortly after launch, India's Mars spacecraft encountered engine problems that prevented mission controllers from placing the spacecraft into the desired orbit. The engine problem had to do with the primary and secondary coils inside the engine that were unable to fire at the same time.